Battle over the 2010 census is just getting started

2010 is going to be a monumental year in U.S. politics, but no politician or race will be at cause. The red-hot issue will be the U.S. census, and its political implications are enormous.

And it’s just getting started.

Concurrently, questions are mounting at the Census Bureau: How will it overcome technology and operational problems? Who’ll lead the bureau? (Bush appointee Steve Murdock, formerly of UTSA, stepped down.) How exact will the count be?

And more recently, how involved will the White House be? This is riling the GOP. President Barack Obama’s second pick for Commerce, Republican Sen. Judd Gregg, walked in part because of the partisan fighting over the census count.

Accuracy, you might assume, is a central issue for both Republicans and Democrats. But not for the reasons you might assume.

A story in Time magazine puts it well. “In very general terms, Republicans would prefer to err on the side of undercounting, and Democrats would prefer to err on the side of over counting.”

And guess who Republicans would like undercounted and Democrats so eagerly want overcounted? Everyone in urban America, including minority groups, especially Latinos, the nation’s fastest-growing population.

How the numbers add up will have a big impact on redistricting, or how political boundaries will be redrawn, and how congressional seats will be distributed.

But here’s another major issue behind the infighting: The census is supposed to count every person in the country, whether they’re here legally or illegally. That’s the goal.

Time reported that the “1990 census missed an estimated 8 million people — mostly immigrants and urban minorities — and it managed to double-count 4 million white Americans.”

We should be concerned with what was recently reported about the technical problems facing Census. An AP story in the Chicago Tribune says acting director Thomas Mesenbourg acknowledges the bureau’s “challenges of counting minorities as well as a record number of people displaced from their homes due to the mortgage foreclosure crisis.”

Census will face such problems even though it’s training 140,000 people to do its canvassing and even though it has the biggest budget it has ever had: $14 billion.

TheHill.com recently reported that Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma says letting Murdock get away was a mistake. He called it “unfortunate for us as a nation” and “urged President Obama to bring Murdock back to head the 2010 census.”

Murdock was Texas’ first official state demographer and led the Texas State Data Center and Texas Population Estimates and Projections Program before going to the Census. He’s now teaching at Rice University. He and his wife, Mary Zey, came to UTSA to build a doctoral department with great sensitivity toward its students and the state’s demographic makeup.